When Stéphane Doutriaux was leaving business school and graduating, he faced a problem many of us have probably faced at some point in our lives: How to keep in contact with people who he may never otherwise see again. Think about the last social event you attended and how you made sure that you got the right contact details of the people you met. Did you scribble an email address on a piece of paper? Or just spell out your full name and tell someone to look you up on Facebook (or even just to Google you)? For all our social connectivity, most of us are still not great at using technology to make the process of staying in touch with people who we meet any easier.

The solution Stéphane built was a tiny USB-like key called a Poken. It resembles a little animated face along with a four fingered hand that can transmit details stored on the device to anyone else who is carrying another Poken. Through touching your devices together (called a high-four), you can share your details with someone else, and then go through all your contacts after an event and decide who you would like to "approve" to be part of your network on Facebook or LinkedIn or one of more than a dozen other social sites.

It may seem like a simple idea, but the concept is quickly catching fire. Since initially awakening the imagination of tastemakers at SXSW last year, the product has been featured by CNN, Forbes, and FoxBusiness. In the last few months, it has also been used by large companies including BMW, Samsung and IBM at events around the world. What makes the Poken so appealing?

The Poken lets you share your details in an instant. It is cute and easy to use and addictive if you happen to be at an event where there are lots of other people with Pokens. It's the next evolution of our most basic of methods for sharing our identities with others that has existed for decades (or perhaps even longer): the business card.

The Poken is a social device that allows us to connect with people who we might otherwise never meet or stay in touch with. Transformative technology helps people to get together in unlikely ways, and in a world where there are so many closed communities, apps to order pizza and other reasons for us to seclude ourselves and interact with other people less and less, we could all use some good old fashioned face time with a few more high-fours.

Thanks Poken and Stéphane for helping us do just that. You're Character Approved.

[Image: Poken]